This is an opinion column.

For generations, America has led its opponents by double digits at the end of the championship game, and looked its principal rivals in the eyes, and pointed to the ring finger where the bling is going to go.

That’s what America is as a country, and it celebrates that fact, and now people want to judge a young Black woman on a basketball court for being the new face of unapologetic, swaggering American power?

Go shoot your guns off somewhere else. Angel Reese of LSU, newly crowned women’s college basketball national champion, will continue to fire from the hip in the rhythm of a familiar style.

“All year, I was critiqued about who I was,” Reese said. “I don’t fit in a box that y’all want me to be in. I’m too hood. I’m too ghetto. But when other people do it, y’all say nothing. So this was for the girls that look like me, that’s going to speak up on what they believe in. It’s unapologetically you.”

Listen a little closer to her song. She is singing the real American anthem.

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We have heard it before, and we will feel it again, because her words of sweet defiance have always been the soundtrack of this country. The young Americans, as they always do and always have done, are leading in ways that the older generations can’t even really understand. The speed at which American culture evolves remains one of the country’s greatest strengths, but American bravado is a constant character of its own theater forever and always. You know it when you see it, and we witnessed it on Sunday with Reese in the championship game of the NCAA Tournament.

The LSU women’s basketball team won the national championship on Sunday, defeating Iowa 102-85. It was an incredible game and the players of LSU and Iowa were stunningly beautiful in their skill and form. The collective talent of LSU and Iowa were so overwhelming, in fact, that the piddling action of the men’s championship on Monday between UConn and San Diego State felt like an afterthought. UConn won 76-59, but it was all overshadowed by the afterglow of the women.

Our heads were still buzzing with the echoes of Reese’s fireworks.

An estimated average of 9.9 million people watched the women’s championship, and that viewership set a new record for women’s college basketball. The stunning power of the game then exploded off in directions that transcend sports when Reese, LSU’s star, openly taunted Iowa’s best player, Caitlin Clark, with one of Clark’s own signature ego-centric hand gestures.

Clark, of course, because in America we know who the true spirit totems really are, borrowed her unabashed stagecraft from pro wrestling’s John Cena.

Cena made famous this funny thing. After he incapacitates opponents in or around the wrestling ring, he waves his hand in front of his face in a symbolic kind of made-for-cable-TV kind of oiled-down celebration. It means “you can’t see me,” or something close to that English translation, and so now it’s one of the great social-media memes of our time.

It’s all fun stuff, apparently, until a Black woman tries it out on a white basketball rival who everyone was already celebrating for her showy on-court, pro-wrestling-style confidence.

“You can’t see me” Reese signed to Clark at the end of the game, one fellow trash-talker to another, and, predictably, it set off a bunch of angry people trying really hard to explain why they were so mad at Reese in ways that had nothing to do with race but we all know that was really it.

All the buzzwords came out for all the unacceptable stuff people can’t say in public anymore: classless, poor sportsmanship, woke, etc, blah, blah, blah. The great irony of this exercise in Americanism isn’t that Clark uses the exact same taunt during games. It’s actually this: Reese’s unflinching attitude is the same cavalier spirit of this country that her critics celebrate and champion every single day.

The free and boundless life force of LSU’s new basketball icon is so poetically American that she’s even called “Bayou Barbie.” In her moment on the court, Reese was the face of her country and her hand was the soul of a nation. What does the hand say to the face? “You can’t see me,” and I don’t know if we’re better than anyone else for it, but it made me proud and it sure as salt tasted like America.

Didn’t Babe Ruth call his shot? The Americanized version of that legend wants us to think he did.

Isn’t Muhammad Ali an American treasure because his voice was just as strong as his fists?

Is John Cena a God-fearing American patriot or not?

Here’s the genius of Reese, though. She knew. These young Americans are pros at this new game of media manipulation. Reese was setting everyone up, and she grabbed that lightning bolt and rode the electricity all the way down to the streets of this country until it cooked the grid and turned out the lights.

Again and again and again, this country’s inherent brilliance remains undefeated, indefatigable and impossible to deny. It is American expressionism. No matter how we try to sabotage it from within, beat it back and channel it into toxic sludge to peddle advertising for cable news networks, that T-shirt is always going to sell out for $35 a hit. It evolves into a different form of itself by the hour.

Maybe Reese’s showy attitude made you feel something that didn’t agree with your delicate sensibilities, but do you really want her to change for you? That’s not what we do in this country. That’s how our principal rivals operate, however, while they struggle to understand that it’s America’s freedom of expression that built a double-digit lead.

America was formed by the hands of Reese’s celebration and for the hands of Reese’s magnetic energy. It’s all there even if sometimes people can’t see it.

Joseph Goodman is the lead sports columnist for the Alabama Media Group, and author of “We Want Bama”. It’s a book about togetherness, hope and rum. You can find him on Twitter @JoeGoodmanJr.